We can’t live in fear of saying what we think
LEGISLATION concerning thought and speech always raises questions of great importance to society. Is there a presumption in favour of free thought and the right to express it?
Is there a narrow focus so that police and judicial interpretation does not catch in the criminal net thought and language not intended to be there?
And does the legislation widen or restrict the value of liberty for society as a whole?
In the Hate Crime Bill there is not even a suggestion that these central principles have been taken into account.
At the most fundamental level, about what it means to be in a free society, with the right to speak one’s mind, it fails.
The Scottish Enlightenment helped shine a beacon of reason and tolerance upon the world.
It is a matter of profound regret that our parliament is invited by a Scottish Government to dim that light and place our nation now, in a veil of intolerance.
The Hate Crime Bill is not sui generis. It has been fashioned in the fevered climate now gripping Western society, which, if not checked, will destroy with intolerance our inheritance from the Enlightenment to speak without fear of retribution from the organs of the state.
There is nothing more dangerous to human freedom than those who are so righteous in their certainty over what can and what cannot be said.
They so easily slide from disapproval to punishment, believing they are entitled to do so.
That righteous certainty underpinned the Inquisition, Marxist-Leninism as practised by Stalin, and Mao’s cultural revolution.
Today in Hong Kong, libraries are being cleared of books that do not conform to the thoughts of Xi Jinping. No doubt, they will be burned.
Of course here in the West, those guided today by righteous certainty on what is ‘WrongSpeak’ don’t burn people at the stake or consign them to the Gulag.
No, but they are with those cited above in principle, in that they seek to punish those whose views they do not like: by demanding they be sacked; that others and their works be ‘cancelled’, and some imprisoned as the Hate Crime Bill proposes.
The promotion of the idea of WrongSpeak inevitably puts a halter on the tongues of millions who fear making a mistake in saying what is in their minds.
Free thinking and the use of language to express thoughts is the intellectual life-blood of a society, without which it stagnates.
That great asset of curiosity will be curbed lest it lead into dangerous areas; vigorous dispute and challenges to orthodoxy, from which new ideas emerge, cannot flourish in a verbal desert.
The more we examine what is happening, the more important it is to contest it, because the road it would set us on is a dangerous one.
IREADILY accept that the law has an important function: to enshrine a moral value and so promote its support, such as racial equality. And I have no disagreement with the contention that our immigrant minorities need special protection.
Part of the proposed Bill consolidates what have been piecemeal approaches in providing that protection, but it does not stop there.
It casts that net of criminality much wider, with a longer list of protected persons, extending the collection of stirring-up offences to non-racial groups; a possession offence (Clause 5) that will censor the communication of material, and – something to take the breath away of the artistic community – we have Clause 4, meant to catch anyone judged culpable for language expressed during the public performance of a play.
I can think of no worse way to inflict damage upon a society than to have the law hover over those who write provocative plays that challenge us to think outside the box of orthodoxy.
A new campaign, Free to Disagree, aims to resist this cynical legislation.
I’m proud to lend it my support and implore other free-minded citizens to do the same.
If we live in fear of saying what we think, we are into self-censorship and its deadening effect upon intellectual life.
Self-censorship or freedom of speech? This Bill will bring the former. We must oppose it to maintain the latter.